Wednesday, August 8, 2012

David Carpenter

Shattered Peace

Sign: Mount Tamalpais

Edda Kane went out on August 19 in
1979 to hike the trails in a park at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, also
known as “the Sleeping Lady,” which overlooked San Francisco’s Golden
Gate Bridge. At 44, she was a married bank executive with an athletic
lifestyle. On this day, she found no one to join her, so she went out
alone to get her workout. But she did not return home that day, so her
worried husband contacted the police. Believing she was in trouble,
they sent out a search team, including dog handlers, just in case she
had fallen and was in some inaccessible place. But despite the fact
that her car remained untouched in the parking lot, they failed to
locate her that night.

Found the next day, Edda was dead.
She’d been attacked from behind and had a bullet wound on the back of
her skull. The police believed, from her position on her knees with her
face on the ground, that possibly she had been forced to show
subservience to her killer, perhaps even to beg for her life. The
killer had removed $10 from her wallet, along with some credit cards,
and had taken her glasses but had left her jewelry. It was the first
known killing on Tamalpais.

Witnesses described two lone men, one
blond and acting rather strangely, and the other wearing a dark blue
jacket which apparently made him sweat. He’d hid his face with it, but
people estimated that he was about 35.

The autopsy showed that Edda had been
shot once with a .44-caliber gun and it appeared that she’d been the
victim of an execution style attack. Yet she had not been raped, so the
motive for this unthinkable attack remained a mystery. In fact, no
one who knew Edda could think of any reason why someone might want to
harm her. There was little evidence in the area to assist the police to
track her killer, so the murder went unsolved. It shook up people who
used the park, but after a while things returned to normal.
Eventually, however, Edda Kane’s murder would gain a different status
as more than just an isolated unsolved homicide; it would become the
first of more to come.

Book cover: The Sleeping Lady

Mixed Signals

Not until spring the following year was
there another violent incident, but in early March, the body of Barbara
Schwartz, 23, was found murdered in the same park where Edda Kane was
killed. Out hiking with her dog on the 8th, the young baker had been
repeatedly stabbed rather than shot, and her wounds had been to the
chest. But there had been a witness who had watched the entire episode,
and it was she who led the rangers to the crime scene.

This female hiker was watching through
the trees as a thin, athletic man, about twenty-five, she guessed,
approached Barbara Schwartz, whose dog was barking. He had a hawk nose
and dark hair, and he wore hiking boots. To her surprise, he suddenly
began to stab Barbara with a knife. They struggled for nearly a minute,
and then he fled as Barbara fell to the ground. The witness ran for
help, so the crime scene was quickly processed and a witness report
drawn up. Police found a pair of blood-stained bifocal glasses that
they hoped had belonged to the killer.

In retrospect, the witness’s description
would prove to be wildly erroneous in every respect — which she
herself would later admit — and it would mislead the investigation for
some time. Other hikers that day had seen a lone male, wearing glasses,
who looked to be in his forties. He wore a raincoat, despite the fact
that it was not raining. Although no one knew it at the time, this man
was more likely Barbara’s killer.

The pathologist counted twelve separate
wounds in her chest and he estimated that her attacker had used a
ten-inch knife. A few days later, some kids found a boning knife near
the crime scene, crusted with blood. It proved to have been purchased
at a chain grocery store, but the specific location could not be pinned
down. Unfortunately, a TV reporter handled it, obliterating
fingerprints.

The bifocals found near Barbara turned
out to be prison issue, so investigators busily checked lists of
recently released convicts, especially those with a record of sex
crimes who resembled the sketch a police artist had made from the
witness report. At this point, the FBI’s San Francisco-based field
office got involved, along with other agencies. However, the
investigation turned up no good leads.

Map of California with Marin County locator.

In fact, the police in another
jurisdiction did question a man that night who claimed to have been
wounded in a convenience store attack, but having no access to the
Marin County all-points bulletin, they failed to put and two
together. While they cannot be blamed for that, they neglected to find
out that there had been a convenience store robbery in the area. In
any event, this man, with his quiet manner, looked nothing like the
predator who had stabbed Barbara Schwartz to death, so the link would
probably not have been made that night.

The next day, the wounded man visited an
optometrist — Barbara Schwartz’s doctor — to get a new pair of glasses.
Although police questioned him about Barbara’s prescription, he never
heard about or saw the flyer about the eyeglasses found at the scene.
That was unfortunate, for it’s likely he would have recognized the
unique prescription. Instead, the killer was free to continue.

The principal source for this spate of murders during the early 1980s is Robert Graysmith’s book, The Sleeping Lady, as well as news reports from area California papers, primarily the San Francisco Chronicle. Another key source is John Douglas’ first book, Mindhunter,
because he was the FBI profiler who got involved in the case when it
appeared that a serial killer was on the loose. He provides important
insights into how this killer was studied, as well as explanations for
why he might have been a psychopathic lust killer in the first place.

Graysmith opens his book with the legend
of the Sleeping Lady: a sun god fell in love with an Indian maiden, so
he carried her off into the sky. But then he stumbled over Mount
Diablo and as he fell back to Earth, she was killed. The place where
she hit the ground is where the mountain supposedly grew up into the
profile of a sleeping woman. Or a dead one.

One More

Again, months passed, and then another
young woman entered the park alone to go jogging. People were
certainly afraid about being in the wilderness areas, but a few wanted
to demonstrate that the parklands were largely safe. They would soon
learn differently.

Anne Alderson

Anne Alderson, 26 and a former Peace
Corps volunteer, was seen by several people on October 15, at the end
of a long Columbus Day weekend, and the park’s caretaker recalled
seeing her sitting alone in the 5,000-seat amphitheater to watch the
sunset. He considered warning her about the potential danger of being
alone at dusk but decided not to disturb her. Graysmith says that
earlier that day this same witness had seen a lone male in the area as
well, around age 50, who was just standing around. Two other people,
says John Douglas, recalled seeing Anne near the area where Edda Kane
had been killed over a year before. Then she apparently came under
attack, an easy mark, by all accounts.

She, too, had also been shot with a
single bullet from a .38 pistol, which had gone through the right side
of her head, but in this incident, there was a significant difference:
Anne had been raped and then allowed to get dressed again. Her right
earring was missing and she’d been propped, face up, against a rock.
What linked this murder clearly to Edda Kane’s was her position. It
appeared from her twisted arrangement that she might have been forced to
kneel as well before being killed. What police did not yet know is
that there were two other victims that weekend, but only Anne had been
quickly found.

Not far away, a double homicide around
the same time provided a tentative lead on a suspect, because the
victims had both been shot by an apparently demented individual.

A Good Suspect

Mark McDermand

In a home not far from Mount
Tamalpais on October 16, 1980, two people were found shot to death.
According to the court records, this is what occurred: Mark McDermand,
35, and his brother, Edwin, 40, both resided with their mother, Helen
McDermand, 75, in Mill Valley. At
approximately 8:30 P.M. sheriff’s deputies forced their way into the
home at the request of a concerned friend. They found the body of a
man lying in a hallway off to the left of the living room, whom they
learned was Edwin. He had been dead approximately 12 hours, and several
bullet wounds were evident in his head and chest.

In a locked bedroom was the body of an
elderly woman, subsequently identified as Helen, lying on the bed and
covered by a blanket. The body had a single bullet wound behind the
left ear. Scattered around the floor were eight spent .22 caliber
casings: five near Edwin’s body, one in the living room near the door
to Helen’s bedroom, one near a bookshelf between Edwin’s and Helen’s
bedrooms, and one in Edwin’s bedroom.

Looking around, the deputies went outside
and observed a small, padlocked door leading into the basement. After
forcing entry, they discovered a note tacked to the inner side of the
door, addressed to “Shitheels” and stating that by the time the note was
discovered, the reader would be “way too late;” the author would be found on the news or on a “slab.” It was signed “Mr. Hate.”

This smelly, dirty basement area had been
the bedroom of Mark McDermand. He seemed a likely suspect, as there
were spent .38 caliber casings in his room, along with three live
rounds of .22 caliber ammunition, and ankle holsters for a handgun and a
knife.

The coroner said later that while it was
impossible to determine either victim’s exact time of the death,
samples of the vitreous humor fluid from their eyes suggested that both
deaths had occurred from three to four days earlier.

Within a few days, the local newspapers
and the Marin County Sheriff and other members of his staff received
letters from an individual who claimed responsibility. A handwriting
expert testified that the author of these letters was the same person
who had written the note tacked to Mark’s bedroom door; the writer
claimed he would not be captured alive. Clearly he was following the
news coverage, so the police devised a plan to lure him in: they
indicated that if he surrendered, they would treat him fairly. They
ran a letter directed to Mark, giving him a phone number.

Capture

An individual identifying himself as Mark
McDermand called the number that evening, October 24. He said he would
consider giving himself up, but he had some things to do first. He
called again two days later, describing details about the killings. He
said he had tried to kill his mother and brother quickly, but he’d
miscalculated with Edwin and had to shoot him five or six times. His
motive was to stop Edwin from hurting others and to prevent his mother
from realizing that he’d killed Edwin. He then agreed to turn himself
in the following day.

When he approached the police, McDermand
was wearing a belt with a .38-caliber revolver in it. He also had a set
of thumb cuffs and three speed loaders. In his car was a .22-caliber
pistol, a .12-gauge shotgun, ammunition, a metal box containing
numerous hypodermic syringes, and some vials of insulin. Mark had diabetes.

When the investigation was complete, the
police thought they had a good sense of the story. Edwin had a record
of acting strangely and been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He
deteriorated rapidly. Mark became impatient, referring to him as “It”
or “the Thing.” On one or more occasion during the six-month period
prior to the murders, he had confided to a friend in a dejected manner
that he didn’t know what would become of his brother once their mother
was gone, and that someday he “would put ‘it’ out of its misery.”

McDermand had borrowed the guns he used
in the homicides, and had then prepared himself to go on the run for a
number of months. In his defense, he said that he had acted out of
diminished capacity and indicated that, like his brother and mother, he
suffered from schizophrenia. There was little dispute that Edwin’s
mental state was disorganized, and evidence was offered that Mark, too,
had experienced headaches and blackouts. He claimed he could not even
remember the murders, or when he did, he recalled a number of different
versions.

The jury nevertheless found Mark
McDermand guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, and he received
the death penalty. Yet his potential part in the trailside murders was
quickly resolved: none of his weapons matched the bullets used on the
two victims who’d been shot. And, most telling, after he was in
custody, the murders continued. The next discovery was horrifying.

Gruesome Dump Site

Late that November, it became clear that
the killer had been busier than the police had realized; four bodies
were found on the same day, and the victims appeared to have been
killed in pairs, two recently and two at least six weeks earlier.

Sign: Point Reyes National Seashore Park

A young woman named Shauna May was
supposed to meet friends on November 28 in Point Reyes National Seashore
Park to go hiking. This park was a few miles north of San Francisco
and had not yet become the scene of slaughter. When she failed to show,
her friends alerted park officials. It was two days before they found
her nude body. She’d been trussed with picture frame wire, shot three
times in the head, and shoved into a shallow trench. The autopsy later
determined that she had been raped.

Close by, to the point of touching her,
was the body of another young woman, twenty-two-year-old Diana
O’Connell. She, too, had gone missing while hiking with friends. One
had been in front of her on the path, the other some ways behind.
Neither saw her slip away.

The two victims lay together, face down.
It seemed that Diana, shot once in the head, had been murdered at the
same time as Shauna May, since another hiker had heard four shots in
that area at mid-afternoon. Their clothing was piled onto their
knapsacks and a pair of panties was stuffed in Diana’s mouth. She’d been
strangled with wire and raped as well. The police assumed that the
killer had interrupted one of these women in her hike with the
intention of rape and the other had come along at the wrong time. As a
witness, she had to be eliminated, too. A later investigation indicated
they had not known each other.

Cindy Moreland

But the day turned out to be worse
than anyone had anticipated. During the search, two more bodies were
discovered just half a mile away — actually found first — and both
victims had been shot in the head. For the first time, one victim was
male. They were identified as Richard Stowers, 19, and Cynthia
Moreland, 18. They had been engaged to be married and had gone hiking
together in mid-October, in an area that Cynthia reportedly knew quite
well. They’d been reported missing on October 11, but had not been
found. In fact, Rick was considered to be AWOL from the coast guard.

Rick Stowers

An autopsy placed their time of death
just a few days before that of Anne Alderson. So either there were
two predators roaming the area or the same person had gone looking for
victims in two different parks. Then ballistics analysis confirmed that
the killer of Anne Alderson had also shot May and O’Connell. There
was one very deadly predator.

Hikers were warned in both parks not to
hike alone, although being with another person had not helped Stowers
and Moreland. People who loved the nature trails found other places to
go or remained home until the murders were solved.

Sheriff Al Howenstein

Those people who had spotted a
victim with someone offered what little they could recall, and Marin
County Sheriff G. Albert Howenstein Jr. had a composite drawing made to
show others who’d also been in the area. However, it was difficult to
get a consensus on key features. Douglas says that the witnesses
conflicted on such things as the age of the man seen with a victim, and
his facial features.

Many people still recalled an earlier
series of murders in the area that had never been solved, and Douglas
indicates that there was speculation about whether he’d risen his ugly
head again.

Zodiac – David Carpenter

Police Sketch of the Zodiac

Between December 1968 and July 1969, a
decade earlier than the Trailside Killings, a man shot two couples in
Vallejo, California, on two separate occasions, and called to take
credit for them. One young man had survived to give a description.
Then the editors of three San Francisco papers each received part of a
strange letter claiming to be from the Vallejo killer. He had used too
much postage and his message consisted of a printed cryptogram composed
of symbols and signed with a crossed-circle symbol. One had to put them
all together to crack the code, which a local teacher, after
painstaking work, managed to do. Its author was clearly playing a
sadistic game, as he described his joy in killing people and his
intention to keep doing so.

Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Hartnell

Thus began a cat-and-mouse game by “the Zodiac,”
as he called himself. Then he attacked a third couple. On September
27, 1969, Cecelia Ann Shepard and her friend, Bryan Hartnell, were
picnicking at Lake Berryessa, where a man wearing a black executioner’s
hood approached them. He stabbed them, attacking the girl repeatedly,
and afterward called the police to report it. He struck again, two
weeks later, killing cab driver Paul Stine. Soon after, the Chronicle
received a letter with a torn piece of Stine’s shirt. Yet no leads
proved productive, and there was speculation that this same killer had
been responsible for the murder of a young woman in another town as
well. The Zodiac kept in sporadic contact with the SFPD and the Chronicle, but his killing seemed to end with seven victims, despite more extravagant claims —and threats — on his part.

Many different suspects were developed,
but none checked out. The case proved to be one of the rare times when
a serial murderer appeared to be quite clever and well-educated,
making his crimes into a layered series of games. That he seemed to
withdraw and lie low proved disturbing, because if he remained at
large, he could always start up again, there or elsewhere. Douglas
suggested that he might have been arrested for something, which had kept
him from acting. For all anyone knew, this was the same person,
freshly released, although the MO was certainly different. No one was
calling to take credit for these murders, nor offering any codes.

Winter passed without further mishaps
that anyone knew of (they would later learn this was not the case), but
the police were busy with their investigation. Still, they had no
leads. Around this time, the new art of profiling got some play.
Graysmith is dismissive, but John Douglas actually had something
interesting to say.

Profilers

Roy Hazelwood

In 1980, Douglas writes, the police
from the San Francisco Bay area had requested the FBI’s help on the
series of hiking path murders. By this time, the press had already
dubbed the offender the “Trailside Killer.” The initial request went to
Special Agent Roy Hazelwood, who was a sex crimes expert. He and
Douglas had published an article that year about lust murder, setting
forth the distinctions between organized and disorganized killers, and
Hazelwood believed that sexual assault was generally motivated by
aggression, sex or power. The fantasies that occur around puberty
influenced the type of victim a lust killer selects, as well as his
approach, preferred sexual activities, rituals, and decision to
complete the act (or not) with murder.

Hazelwood viewed sex offenders as either
impulsive or ritualistic. Impulsive offenders were opportunistic and
generally of lower intelligence and economic means, and their sexual
behavior often served power or anger needs. Ritualistic offenders, on
the other hand, indulged in paraphilias and compulsive behaviors that
satisfied a specific psychological need. As they centered their lives
around this activity, they learned to lie and manipulate in order to
keep it hidden from others and secretly active.

Hazelwood discussed the case with
Douglas, who at that time was the Bureau’s only full-time profiler in
the field, and they worked it together. They were both part of the
first generation of FBI profilers, an elite group of agents hand-picked
to learn the art of the psychological analysis of crime scenes. They
had yet to have any striking cases that would gain them national
exposure, but they were being consulted more often by local
jurisdictions whose investigators were willing to look into any avenue
for assistance.

The basic idea of a criminal profile was
to acquire a body of information that revealed a common pattern for a
general description of an UNSUB (unknown subject) in terms of habit,
possible employment, martial status, mental state, and personality
traits. Probing for an experiential assessment of a criminal from a
series of crime scenes involved a detailed victimology — learning
significant facts about the victim’s life, especially in the days and
hours leading up to his or her death. Their movements were mapped and
investigators study all of their personal communications for signals to
where they may have crossed paths with a viable suspect.

Douglas went to San Francisco to examine
the crime scene data and case photos, and he said the killer would be
familiar with the area (so a local man), but he was shy, reclusive, and
may have a speech impediment. Contrary to what some local
psychologists had decided, who had described the offender as charming,
sophisticated and good-looking, Douglas thought he would be unsure of
himself in social situations. He chose victims of opportunity rather
than preferring a certain victim type. He was white, intelligent, blue
collar, and had spent time in jail. His MO was to approach from behind,
if possible, and become aggressive to overwhelm the victim. He was
“like a spider waiting for a bug to fly into his web.” He’d have a
history of at least two of the three background indicators:
fire-starting, bed-wetting, and cruelty animals. Douglas although
thought he was probably in his thirties and had recently experienced
some precipitating stressors. While he had committed rape before this
series of murders, he had not killed.

That Douglas had been so specific about
the speech impediment drew a lot of doubt from the task force members;
they wondered how he could know something like that. Douglas explained
that the secluded killing areas, the method of approach, and the fact
that the offender did not approach his victims in a social situation to
lure them indicated some degree of shyness or shame. He believed it
was due to a physical malady. Overpowering someone gave the killer some
sense of compensation for his handicap. “He has some kind of defect
that really bothers him,” he said.

The profile did not offer anything that
one could call a viable lead unless they had a suspect, so the police
were still in the same place. They had a guy who roamed the thickest
areas of the hiking trails, lying in wait for potential victims. With
the many miles of trails around San Francisco, there wasn’t much they
could do.

After Douglas returned to Quantico, the
killer struck again in March 1981. This time, though, he made a serious
blunder. For him, it was the beginning of the end, even though he had
switched to yet another park.

Survivor

Map of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

Ellen Marie Hansen and Stephen
Haertle, undergraduates at the University of California at Davis, were
hiking in the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park on March 29, 1981. This
area was about eighty miles south of San Francisco, near to Santa Cruz
— another town that had suffered a series of murders during the early
1970s. Edmund Kemper, John Linley Frazier and Herbert Mullin
had killed there around the same time, Frazier targeting a family,
Kemper killing coeds, and Mullin imagining he had to eliminate
“sacrifices” to protect the state from an earthquake. It had been nearly
a decade, however, since all of that had happened and all three
offenders were safely behind bars.

Ellen Hansen

Steve Haertle would later describe
what had taken place, as he managed to survive despite being shot. A
man approached them, he said, not far from an observation deck and he
had a pistol in his hand. He threatened them with it and insisted that
Hansen allow him to rape her. She refused, and Haertle begged the man
to let them go, but the stranger lifted his gun and in front of
Haertle, shot Hansen point-blank, twice, in the head and once in the
shoulder. Haertle was horrified but unable to get away as the stranger
then shot him as well. However, the bullets burrowed through his neck,
so he was not killed. The man fled the area as Haertle sought help from
other hikers.

He was obviously in a perfect position
to offer police a description of this attacker, although trauma
involving guns often interferes with one’s memory. Steve did recall
the man’s crooked yellow teeth and thought he was about fifty and
balding. He’d had a backpack and wore dark glasses, as well as a gold
jacket with lettering on the back and a baseball cap. In addition, he’d
spoken in quick, commanding sentences. Steve estimate that he’d been
about five-foot-ten to six feet tall, and about 170 pounds.

Along with what Haertle offered, other
people also reported a man they had seen on the observation deck,
running after the gunshots, and driving off in a red car of foreign
make. One girl thought it was a Fiat. The Post Standard
indicated that there had been seven witnesses altogether who reported
the man to the police. The resulting physical description differed
markedly from that of the Marin County Killer, but not the MO.

As much as police need to rely on
eyewitnesses, they also know that memory is tricky and many people who
believe in what they’ve seen are nevertheless wrong. About 80% of
people exonerated in recent years, who served time in prison, can attest
to the mistakes. One man even had five witnesses give erroneous
testimony that linked him to a murder.

Yet investigators did manage to get some
good shoeprint impressions, so that if they developed a suspect, they
could compare his shoe size, and perhaps even his shoes, (if he didn’t
toss them), to the impressions.

Police Sketch of Suspect

They ran the composite drawing in a
number of newspapers, both to alert people to what this dangerous
person looked like and to get new leads from residents who might know
him. Only four days later, a woman called to describe a man who
resembled the picture. She had been on a cruise to Japan some
twenty-six years earlier and had confronted a young man named David
Carpenter, a purser on that cruise, who had been bothering her daughter
with inappropriate behavior. She recalled that he had stuttered — the
speech impediment that Douglas had suggested — and had proof of his
name from where he’d signed her daughter’s book.

The police looked into it, but there were
many men in northern California named David Carpenter. As they moved
forward with their investigation, the killer was reading the newspaper.
He decided it was time to grow a beard. He also had found a way to
lure another young woman into his net. However, this time he killed
much closer to home, leading the police right to him. Either stupid or
arrogant, he made yet another mistake, and while the police benefited, a
pretty blond fell victim.

The Trusted Friend

Heather Scaggs

On May 2, Heather Roxanne Scaggs,
20, told her boyfriend that she was going to see David Carpenter about a
used car; supposedly, a friend of Carpenter’s was selling it and he
was going to help her to purchase it. She was a student at Econo Quick
Print, where Carpenter taught people how to use computer typesetting
machines, and sometimes he had given her a lift home in a company car.
She had mentioned wanting a car of her own, so he’d told her about this
opportunity. He even offered to loan her whatever amount she did not
yet have. In fact, he pressured her so much with additional incentives
that she finally gave in and agreed to go see it. Before leaving, she
gave her boyfriend, Dan Pingle, the number and address of David
Carpenter, and a time when she expected to return.

But she did not return then, or hours
later, so Pingle went looking for her and confronted Carpenter. He
pretended that they’d never connected that morning. Now frantic, Pingle
alerted the police. He knew that Carpenter had instructed Heather not
to tell anyone where she was going and to bring $400 for the car. She’d
been in a vulnerable position and had even expressed some concern about
going.

Heather’s disappearance brought up
Carpenter’s name again, already identified as resembling the composite
drawing. That was too great a coincidence. Although no body had been
found, Heather was about the right age to possibly have become a victim
like those killed along hiking trails. The police checked records and
found Carpenter’s parole officer, Richard Wood. As he listened to their
concerns, he started to add things up. Graysmith records his gut-level
impression that Carpenter might be the killer the police were looking
for.

The police now learned that Carpenter
had not shown up in the records of released inmates when they’d
initially looked, due to a technicality. He had been released by
California to serve a federal sentence, Douglas explains, and while
free, he was technically in federal custody. If not for this, he might
have been flagged much earlier.

Wood thought they should keep a watchful
eye on Carpenter, and he did what he could to facilitate their access
to him. Detectives interviewed him about Heather and thought he
resembled the composite of the person seen at the Trailside Murders’
sites. They had also learned that he was a habitual sex offender,
another item not fully documented in his records. The multi-agency task
force got into gear to start following him.

“Please Don’t Hurt Me”

The FBI, along with local
authorities, set up a surveillance van outside the house at 36 Sussex
Street in San Francisco where David Joseph Carpenter, 51, lived with
his aging parents. They also followed him to places he went, especially
when he associated with other criminals. Graysmith includes several
photos from a videotape when they caught him walking with a shopping bag
in his hand. They approached him carefully, speaking in soft tones so
as not to alarm him or inspire him to reach for whatever was in the
bag. He seemed confused at first, but soon insisted on getting a
lawyer. At this point, the agents told him he was under arrest.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he begged.

In Carpenter’s car, a red Fiat with a
bent tailpipe (as described by witnesses), police found books about
local hiking trails, along with many more such maps in his home — over
sixty in all. They also located Carpenter’s former fiancé, who told
them that Carpenter had lost his gold jacket around the time of the
Hansen murder. He said it had been stolen, although that had struck her
as unlikely. This testimony proved that he’d at least had a gold
jacket at that time, placing him circumstantially at the site of the
shooting of Hansen and Haertle.

Thus, Carpenter drove a car similar to
the one described by the surviving victim, had the same optometrist as
another victim, had the right distinctive type of clothing, and had a
record for violent sex crimes. He also suffered from explosive rages
and had recently tried to change his “look” with a different type of
frame for his glasses. In addition, several witnesses had recognized
him as the man who had been in the area of an attack.

David Carpenter

The police put him in a line-up,
inviting everyone who had made a report to participate. Steve Haertle
went to the station to endure the ordeal of seeing again the man who had
shot him and killed his girlfriend. Despite the newly-grown beard
hiding Carpenter’s face, Steve quickly picked him out as the
perpetrator. The Post-Standard indicated that six out of the
seven witnesses did the same, although several were not quite certain.
(Graysmith says that three were unable to make the identification.) A
car line-up was also arranged and witnesses identified the Fiat.
Carpenter was formally charged in the murder and attempted murder in
Santa Cruz. At his arraignment, he stuttered so badly he had a
difficult time answering the judge’s questions, which was to simply
agree that his name was as stated.

“Carpenter’s face contorted and his head shook as he struggled to respond,” states the Post-Standard. “He finally managed to utter a ‘yes’ after the passage of several seconds.”

On May 15, 1981, newspapers published the
stories about Carpenter, the supposed Trailside Killer. In a press
conference, officials reiterated that they believed the killer of eight
had psychologically tortured his victims first.

Then decomposed remains of a female were
found in Big Basin Redwoods Park on Sunday, May 24. Her killer had
apparently tried to hide her body under a lot of brush. He’d removed
her clothing and taken everything except an earring — smiliar to an
earlier murder. An analysis of the dental work indicated that they had
found Heather Scaggs. She had been raped and shot once through the eye
with a .38. That made nine dead.

Patch: Big Basin Redwoods Park

The Man Behind the Predator

David Carpenter

By May 27, the Syracuse Herald-Journal
noted that Marin County District Attorney Jerry Herman was going to
file charges against Carpenter in five more of the murders, all linked
via ballistics analysis to Carpenter’s guns, and he held out hope that
evidence would surface in at least another murder. He was not going to
file charges in the murders of Barbara Schwartz or Edda Kane, since
evidence was lacking. One of them had been stabbed with a knife on
which there were no usable prints and the other killed with a different
gun, which had not been found. Still, the office would continue to
investigate.

Oddly enough, Lane and Gregg indicate
that Carpenter had been a suspect for a time in the Zodiac killings,
but his handwriting and fingerprints had cleared him. A few people
recall him at one point claiming to be the Zodiac.

Whatever the case, his background was
being thoroughly scrutinized. Born on May 6, 1930, in San Francisco,
Carpenter had been raised by strict and aggressive parents. His
alcoholic father beat him or neglected him, while his near-blind mother
was described as domineering. By the time he was seven, he was
stuttering so badly he had a difficult time in any social situation. He
was often ridiculed, which made him painfully reclusive. He received
no therapy but was instead forced to participate in extracurricular
activities, such as ballet and piano. He took out his frustrations on
animals and also wet the bed (two of the three indicators, as Douglas
pointed out). As he grew into adolescence, he looked for opportunities
to express his developing sex drive and by the time he was seventeen,
David had been arrested for molesting two young children, his cousins.
He served a year and apparently learned nothing from the California
Youth Authority, because once released, he became more predatory.
Frasier states that he continued offending until he got married in 1955.

Carpenter worked at various occupations,
including as a ship’s purser, a salesman, and a printer. He apparently
had a demanding sex drive that he tried keeping under control by
subjecting his wife to his constant need. They had three children
together, but Carpenter could not continue to control himself. In
addition to his violent rages, he also prowled around, looking for other
women. Finally, his drive was so desperate, he resorted to outright
violence.

Sentenced

In one incident in 1960, fully described
by Graysmith, Carpenter had befriended a woman, inviting her to his
home to meet his wife and including her in some of his celebratory
moments. Then one day, he picked her up, but instead of taking her to
work as promised, he drove to a wooded area of the Presidio and then
acted as if he was lost. At some point he grabbed her, straddled her,
and used a clothesline to bind her. With a knife, he threatened her,
forcing her to be still. He told her he had a “funny quirk” that needed
to be satisfied. When she resisted and tried to get away, he struck
her several times with a hammer. Douglas states that prior to and
during the incident, he lost his crippling stutter. The victim
described his speech as slow and deliberate, in contrast to the way he
usually talked, and he had seemed unduly angry.

This woman might have been Carpenter’s
first murder victim had she not been saved by a suspicious military
patrol officer who heard her call for help. He’d been looking for
Carpenter’s car, having spotted it earlier, and when he saw what was
happening, he commanded Carpenter to stop. Carpenter shot at him,
missing, so he returned fire and wounded Carpenter. Then the MP
arrested Carpenter and took him in. The victim survived, but Carpenter,
who claimed to have blacked out during the attack, ended up with a
fourteen-year sentence. During this time, his wife, who’d had to put
up with his temper and sexual demands and who’d just given birth to
their third child, divorced him. To psychiatrists who evaluated him,
he gave a range of different stories about what had occurred, from
amnesia to a lover’s quarrel. He’d clearly learned to tell people what
he thought they wanted to hear.

In 1969, Carpenter was freed after only
nine years. He quickly got remarried, and in less then a year, he was
back at it again (and the marriage failed). He tried to rape a woman by
hitting her car to force her out of it. When she struggled against
him, he stabbed her, but she managed to get back into her car and race
toward help. Obviously, Carpenter was now looking for a way to rape but
not return to prison, so he was prepared to eliminate witnesses. He
continued to target women until he was arrested again in Modesto on
February 3, 1970.

While awaiting his trial, Carpenter
conspired with four other inmates at the Calaveras County jail to break
out and escape. They didn’t get very far and he was sentenced to seven
years for kidnap and robbery (not for any sex offenses). He also
received two more years for his parole violations. When he got out in
May 1979, he was not listed as a sex offender, although he clearly was.
By August, he had murdered Edda Kane.

Even while Carpenter continued his
criminal activities, he found a way to pass as a normal, productive
citizen. He took courses in computer printing at the California Trade
School, graduating with a degree. Then he got a job as a typesetter
instructor at an agency affiliated with the school. He took up hiking
as a hobby, but not for the same reasons most people do. He simply
liked the shelter afforded in the wilderness for grabbing young women
to rape and kill without being seen. It remained for the courts to
ensure he return to prison for the rest of his life.

The Final Victim

Map of Castle Rock State Park

On June 16, 1981, in Castle Rock
State Park, rock climbers came across a jaw bone. At the urging of
acquaintances, they brought it in and the police sent it for analysis.
It proved to be human, and with further work it was identified as the
partial remains of a seventeen-year-old high school student, Anna K.
Menjivar, missing since December 28 the previous year. Many people had
suspected that Carpenter had something to do with her disappearance.

Anne Kelly Menjivar

She had worked part-time at the bank
where Carpenter was a client, and he often engaged in conversation with
her. People were under the impression that she was the reason he came
to the bank. But evidence against him was slim. Even the cause of
death could not be established.

Diane O’Connell

Yet other cases could be prosecuted,
and perhaps that would become some sort of justice for young Anna.
Carpenter was formally charged with the five Marin County killings
(Anne Alderson, Diane O’Connell, Shauna May, Cynthia Moreland, and
Richard Stowers), two rapes, and an attempted rape. The police had
recovered the .38 that he’d given to a friend — a bank robber who
wanted no part in protecting a killer and who suspected that Carpenter
was setting him up — and they now had everything they needed to move
forward with a strong case.

Given its inflammatory nature in the
Santa Cruz and San Francisco communities, the venue was shifted three
hundred miles away to Los Angeles.

The First Trial

Carpenter insisted he was innocent and continued to do so throughout two trials.

His first trial was for the murders of
Heather Scaggs and Ellen Hansen, and the attempted murder of Steve
Haertle. It started on October 11, 1983. The judge seated one jury to
decide his guilt and a second one to decide the penalty in the event of a
conviction. Along with the alternates, this made for a substantial
body of people for the attorneys to address.

It took many weeks of voir dire before
DA Art Danner could present his opening argument in May, which focused
on eyewitnesses and ballistics evidence. Carpenter’s gun had been
linked to each of the murders, and Steve Haertle’s testimony
identifying Carpenter as the attacker who shot him and killed his
girlfriend was persuasive. It was no surprise that after six weeks of
testimony, the eight-woman, four-man jury deliberated for eight hours
over the course of two and a half days to reach their verdict. On July
6, 1984, David Carpenter was convicted of two counts of first-degree
murder and one count of attempted murder.

DA Art Danner

“The balding, bespectacled defendant had no visible reaction,” reported the Syracuse Post-Standard.
He attorney shrugged it off, saying that Carpenter had expected to be
convicted and had prepared for it. He also described his client to the
press as a “mental mess,” admitting that he was a killer but resisting
the idea that he should face the death penalty for it: His crimes had
been impulsive, not planned, and he’d been unable to control himself.
Yet no amount of psychological testimony had convinced the jury that
abusive parents were entirely responsible for this killer’s development
toward such cruelty.

The second jury found three special
circumstances that warranted the death penalty: committing multiple
murders, committing during a rape, and lying in wait. Carpenter was to
be given the death sentence via execution in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

But the court was not finished with him.
He had a second trial coming right up for the Marin County killings —
though it would be delayed for several years by legal wrangling. And
this trial would have an unexpected and disheartening glitch.

Five More

The second trial opened in San Diego on
January 5, 1988. Deputy DA John Posey had a huge job ahead of him in
his first death-penalty case, with more than sixty witnesses, but he’d
long prepared for the task. Carpenter’s attorneys were public
defenders Frank Cox and Steve Berlin. Robert Graysmith attended this
proceeding and offers a first-hand account. Unlike the Los Angles
trial, in which the defense had offered few witnesses, Carpenter’s
witness list this time numbered over thirty, and he himself would
testify.

It took until May 10, in a trial that
once again proved that Carpenter’s gun was the one that shot the
victims, and he was convicted of all five of those murders. He’d
offered carefully constructed alibis, but the prosecutors proved that
his documentation had been altered or that he’d been mistaken about
some of his dates.

For seven days, Carpenter was on the
stand. Although he appeared calm and prepared, reading from his
calendar and collection of receipts, he stuttered from time to time as
he described his acquaintances from prison and his various liaisons with
women. He also detailed his activities during the time of each of the
murders of which he was accused. Still, he also showed his anger and
his slippery and glib nature.

It was no surprised that after only
seven hours, another jury also recommended the death sentence for him,
which the judge accepted.

However, a few months later, the jury
forewoman, Barbara Durham, revealed something that could have made a
difference. She told friends that she had been aware (or became aware
during the trial) of Carpenter’s convictions in Los Angeles in 1984 for
the Santa Cruz murders. She had concealed this fact during voir dire
(or during the trial). Judge Herbert Hoffman had to consider whether to
call a mistrial and have Carpenter retried. Since he thought the
evidence had been strong, it was a difficult decision.

On February 21, 1989, Judge Hoffman
ruled that while he believed that Carpenter was certainly guilty of the
crimes, since a member of the jury had unlawfully referred to his
prior conviction during discussions, he had to order a new trial. He
made no secret of the fact that he considered this a travesty of
justice, especially because the trial had been costly.

In 1994, state prosecutors asked the
California Supreme Court in San Francisco to overturn that decision,
since the evidence for Carpenter’s guilt was overwhelming. However,
the Deputy State Public Defender insisted that the jury had been
contaminated and the trial had been essentially biased and unfair.

Justice Armand Arabian

On March 6, 1995, the court refused
to give David Carpenter a new trial. Justice Armand Arabian stated
that it’s virtually impossible to keep secrets in such cases and he
believed that the forewoman’s knowledge had not unduly biased the
jury. Thus, they overturned Judge Hoffman’s decision — probably without
too much disappointment for him.

In 1997, the state Supreme Court upheld
the death penalty for the Scaggs and Hansen murders, and on November
29, 1999, they also upheld Carpenter’s death penalty from his second
trial. Six of the seven judges agreed that he’d had a fair trial for
the five Marin County murders and had been sentenced properly.

As of this writing, he remains on death
row in San Quentin, awaiting appeals through the federal courts. At age
76, he is currently the oldest inmate there.